Collecting bottles of wine presents various opportunities to treat guests, celebrate, and elevate meals. However when the collection outgrows the owner’s ability to keep track of what they have, managing the inventory becomes necessary, usually using an Excel spreadsheet.
That’s the case of Donato, my father-in-law, who accumulated 800+ bottles over 35 years in his house in France. In 2019, as the spreadsheet became too tedious to maintain, the family looked at modern alternatives. None could compete with his time proof system, so we decided to create a solution.
In France, 23% of the population consumes wine daily. The cellar management problem Donato faces touches 5M+ wine enthusiasts in France, and more in the United States, the world's biggest wine market.
How might we optimize cellar management, so wine amateurs spend more time enjoying and less managing?
Team: 1 PM, 1 Designer, 1 Software Engineer • Role: fully responsible for UX Research (user’s context), End-to-end Design, and Branding. Conducted Usability Testing with PM.
APPROACH
We observed and interviewed Donato to understand how he managed his wine collection. As the project was a family venture to help him, he was our main and only user. If the product meant to serve a larger audience, I would recruit several wine amateurs to cover different systems of wine management and storage while considering cultural aspects.
PERSONA: WINE AMATEURS
Goal: experience unique moments with friends and family around wine
Need: keep the inventory up-to-date to accurately know:
What wine and how many bottles they have
Where the bottles are
When to best enjoy wine
Collection: 50 - 1,000 bottles
Storage: multiple racks, often in a dedicated cellar room
Inventory: update Excel spreadsheet twice a year
RESEARCH INSIGHTS
1. Bottles and inventory live in different places, requiring a workaround.
While bottles are in the cellar, Donato’s desktop computer sits in his home office. Ensuring the inventory match digitally and physically requires a frequent commute. As a workaround, Donato prints the spreadsheet, track changes on paper and report them in Excel twice a year.
2. Inventory is hardly up-to-date as maintenance is time-consuming.
Reporting 6 months of handwritten bottle movement takes several weekends. It requires discipline to update the inventory frequently not to make information useless.
“I would love to keep the cellar always up-to-date, but barely find time to do it. Then, it’s hard to know what I have and where things are.”
3. Inventory is prone to errors.
Reporting lots of handwritten notes lead to reading and entry errors. Also, due to the very nature of wine, misplaced bottles tend to stay unnoticed for years, meaning errors accumulate.
Notes example
UX CHALLENGES
Streamline data entry
Prevent errors or make it easy to correct
Bridge the gap between digital and physical inventory
STREAMLINING DATA ENTRY
A bottle of wine can have a dozen features (name, year, region, etc.). To optimize data entry, we considered:
Entering data manually: long and lack copy-pasting.
Extracting information from a label photo: doable but arduous in the context of wine. Labels are non-standardized and ambiguous. For instance, a name can also map the designation or the vineyard.
Extracting information from a label photo with manual mapping using touch-and-drag: long editing.
Extracting information using a label photo demands too much efforts compared to its value, so we explored ways to simplify data entry.
PREVENTING ERRORS - VISUALIZING THE RACKS
Most errors happen with the racks. While browsing, all bottles look alike, making it hard to find a bottle or an empty spot. To avoid scrutinizing, Donato set up a coordinate system. However, the lack of visual context led to location errors.
To support navigation, we considered:
Visual captors. The number of bottles made the cost of equipment steep.
Augmented Reality. With extra hardware required, implementation was hard.
An abstracted digital map. Easy and fast to implement with higher familiarity for the user, we went ahead with this alternative.
Donato’s coordinate system
The multiple states a spot can be in was challenging. A spot can be empty or used, suggested or selected, and containing front-facing bottles or back-facing bottles. During testing, noticeable differences were critical.
Bottles and empty spots are hard to distinguish, especially front-facing bottles
Bottles front-facing and back-facing
BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN PHYSICAL AND DIGITAL INVENTORY
While testing the bottle withdrawal process using our prototype, Donato took out multiple bottles during a single cellar visit, but only updated the app afterward. Accountability was necessary:
The app should clearly articulate when the user should carry a physical action.
The app should receive a confirmation for completed actions.
FINAL SOLUTION
VinoMio is a mobile app that empowers wine amateurs to manage their cellar by spending more time enjoying and less managing.
Accessible wine collection
Information is available and digestible.
Search can accommodate different scenarios.
Unique bottle information
The bottle is detailed by name and year because each vintage tastes different.
The best drinking window is available to enjoy wine at its best, avoiding waste and heartache.
Better Rack Navigation
Information and actions are centralized.
Navigation in the rack gets more accurate.
The reporting of errors is immediate.
IMPACT
Testing showed VinoMio was well-received and the time to complete data entry was perceived as shorter.
“The app solves many problems I had with Excel. Now I can always get an updated collection with me and share it with my family. Some features, such as suggested empty spots to store bottles, make the difference.”
LEARNINGS
Wine is an art and science with cultural nuances. Wine knowledge is wide from making, tasting, food pairing, growing regions, etc. It also has cultural nuances as label focus vary worldwide.
Be mindful of errors. Solving a problem doesn't always mean getting rid of it. Errors are inevitable. We should prevent them as much as possible or enable a smooth management process.
Designing in French. French words tend to be longer than English words. Additionally, we have to be mindful of the tone. French language tends to be more formal than American English.
APPENDIX
BRANDING
Moodboard
Logo, Font and Colors
SCREEN FLOW
Simplified flow
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